As American film has increasingly dominated the world’s cinemas and once-healthy European film industries have grown unable to sustain themselves, the idea of multi-national co-productions, with funds supplied by producers from a variety of countries, has become the norm. This trend was well-established in the ’80s, making it tough to…

Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…

Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. There’s nothing about Blue Streak that is likely to change that. And it’s a shame, because the basic plot — which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s…

As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…

Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting, from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, has long been considered one of the milestones of horror film. Now, after 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version, under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister)–an idea that should sound…

You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters have shot their wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers”–thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such is Lake…

Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last thirty years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late-’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After his…

The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema. Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly the qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore: character insight, social analysis and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at…

The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat, who were mostly disappointed with his American screen debut, last year’s The Replacement Killers. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…

The new Mel Gibson vehicle, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (co-written with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…

Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…

The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western–which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival–is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of some sort…

Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days, it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…

According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Ral Ruiz, still in his late fifties, has made more than a hundred films since 1960; apparently only fifty or so are features, but that’s still an impressive stat. He’s been a staple on the festival circuit…

Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four…or Five…or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse, its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving a film, Enemy of…

First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view Part Two without prejudice as well as be able to judge whether…

Fascism is in the air…well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch, we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), neo-Nazis (American History X), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book-burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, full-blown military rule on American soil. Still in the wings: Enemy…

American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage. First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…

As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…

Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I’m one of them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since the…

After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer (who gave us this year’s transcendent pulp masterpiece, Dark City); and the presence (as star and producer) of Wesley Snipes, a terrific…

The Horse Whisperer, the latest film from Robert Redford and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars, could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach and, most important, his understanding…